Sciber

Complex Systems and Informatics

2013/11/12

Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility

"One-quarter of studies that meet commonly used statistical cutoff may be false. The plague of non-reproducibility in science may be mostly due to scientists’ use of weak statistical tests, as shown by an innovative method developed by statistician Valen Johnson, at Texas A&M University in College Station." Commentary @ Nature News. Full paper @ PNAS>

2013/11/01

Structural and Functional Brain Networks: From Connections to Cognition

"The human brain presents a puzzling and challenging paradox: Despite a fixed anatomy, characterized by its connectivity, its functional repertoire is vast, enabling action, perception, and cognition. This contrasts with organs like the heart that have a dynamic anatomy but just one function. The resolution of this paradox may reside in the brain's network architecture, which organizes local interactions to cope with diverse environmental demands—ensuring adaptability, robustness, resilience to damage, efficient message passing, and diverse functionality from a fixed structure. This review asks how recent advances in understanding brain networks elucidate the brain’s many-to-one (degenerate) function-structure relationships. In other words, how does diverse function arise from an apparently static neuronal architecture? We conclude that the emergence of dynamic functional connectivity, from static structural connections, calls for formal (computational) approaches to neuronal information processing that may resolve the dialectic between structure and function." Full paper @ Science